ENGLISH RADICAL ALLIANCE - The party of England!
Wat Tyler
John Lilburne
G.K Chesterton
OUR RADICAL HERITAGE
England has a proud radical heritage. Today The English Radical Alliance draws inspiration from our radical forefathers as we seek to deliver an England that is fit to live in today.
OUR RADICAL HERITAGE
The word ‘radical’ is derived from the Latin radix – root. Thus to be radical can mean, in one sense, to return to tradition, to origins. But also, to be radical, is to call for ‘the transformation of the existing status quo rather than reforming it to ameliorate its worst aspects’
– in other words to demand thorough social and political change.
England is one of the oldest Nation States in Europe having been forged in the fire of invasion during the 9th and 10th centuries, and provided with a unique system of common law, which provided for trial by a jury of peers before punishment, and a local governmental system, based around the village and the county, that encouraged the participation of everybody in the management of their locality. These early traditions, of freedom and justice for all, were encouraged by the earliest English Radical, King Alfred the Great, who not only organised the fighting resistance to the Viking invader, but also translated written laws from the Latin to English, so that every citizen of the nation could read and understand the statutes that applied to them. But, after barely a century of freedom, the people of England had their entire way of life destroyed, along with their lands, possessions and, often, their lives, following the Norman invasion of 1066.
The effects of this re-distribution of wealth and power (and by physical force!), away from local English people and into the hands of an elite landowning clique are still with us in the 21st century. The descendants of the robber barons that accompanied William ‘the bastard’ still hold onto vast landholdings in 21st century England and, quite often, sit unelected in the House of Lords, or on the boards of businesses and banks, that decide the fate of ordinary folk today. However, during the passage of time there have been moments when groups of individuals dared to raise themselves against the system that enslaved them and, as English Radicals, we count them as our forebears. Here are just a few of those ‘moments’ from our past, but we will start by correcting a much-held myth:
MAGNA CARTA?
Why a question mark? Because we do not believe that Magna Carta, the so-called Great Charter, was anything other than a group of rich and greedy men, descendants of the Conqueror’s friends, who demanded a bigger slice of the national wealth and used popular freedoms as a tool to keep their peasants onside. After the carve-up at Runnymede, the majority of the poor were still enslaved in feudalism, but the monarch (then King John – the medieval equivalent of Gordon Brown!) was slightly more accountable to his barons. Associations with Runnymede thus encourage the continued destruction of English liberties whilst enshrining the rule of an out-of-touch political class. Modern politicians like to quote Magna Carta, after all, these are the people who sign EU Treaties that give away our freedoms without consulting us, says it all really.
1381 – THE GREAT REVOLT
In 1380 the government of the young King Richard II, desperate to rebuild the treasury after years of public spending on overseas wars, tripled the tax that everyone over 15 years of age would pay regardless of income. After fifty years of fighting foreign wars, and of coping with the loss of over 50% of the population through plague, this led to a series of local uprisings against the government’s tax collectors. The most serious of these uprisings saw the men of the south-east seize control of the city of London, forcing the young King and his advisors to concede to the rebels’ ‘charter’. What were their demands?
1. Wholesale emancipation from all forms of serfdom and labour service.
2. A return of full powers to local government. In effect, England would become a federation of County-Kingdoms.
3. The return of Anglo-Saxon laws protecting popular rights and freedoms.
4. Abolition of lordship and the division of property between all men.
After the King agreed to the terms, the rebels dispersed to their shires where their leaders were later hunted down, and then hung, drawn and quartered. The rebels’ main leader, Wat Tyler, was murdered and the King renounced the agreement he had made earlier. Observing one of the executions Richard said: ‘you will remain in bondage, not as before but incomparably harsher’.
PILGRIMAGE OF GRACE
In the 16th century Henry VIII established the Church of England, with himself at the head, and during the course of the period 1535-37 destroyed a culture and religious tradition that had existed for over 800 years. Without a second’s thought for the consequences, Henry and his advisors ordered the wholesale upheaval of popular worship, and destroyed the institutions that had provided employment, sustenance and spiritual enlightenment to the people of England. In 1536, the North of England rose in revolt against these changes demanding that Henry return England to its traditional religion, in what became known as the Pilgrimage of Grace. They also demanded a return to more localised systems of justice and self-government – this was the Pontefract Declaration. Faced with an organised rebel army, Henry agreed to all of the demands and asked the rebels to disperse to their communities. Once they were back home, and isolated from the main force, their leaders were hunted down and executed (familiar theme?). The only concession that Henry made was the creation of the first regional government in England – the Council of the North, based in York - and that was run by, and for, the nobles and gentry.
THE PUTNEY DEBATES
In the 17th century, the new ranks of gentry that had been enriched as a result of the acquisition of the former religious lands, decided that they wanted to have more of a say in running the country and in deciding when and why they would pay tax. This led to the English Civil War and, in order to raise their local forces, the leaders of the Parliamentarians claimed to be fighting on behalf of greater liberty for all. In fact, once victory was in the bag, Parliament, like Richard II and Henry VIII before them, wanted the masses to forget what they had been promised and go back home to their previous pauper-like existence, and leave the freedoms and liberties to those who had the money and land to make use of them.
This now led to a series of political outpourings by representatives of the New Model Army and their citizen supporters, in particular, by a group of men and women known as the Levellers. The Levellers demanded universal suffrage; annual Parliaments; paid MPs, so that the poor could be represented; freedom of speech and of the press; religious toleration; and reform of local government making all office-holders accountable. The Levellers, and their spokesmen, believed that every Englishman was born free, and that he should have more of a say in how he was governed. More, they believed that Parliament was there to represent the people and that if it failed to do so could be removed by force, the same as had happened with the King. In the local parish church at Putney, the Levellers argued their case with the representative of Parliament, Henry Ireton, who had been sent to argue the case that only men of property should be elected to Parliament. This led to the quote by the Leveller leader Thomas Rainborowe – ‘the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he’. Eventually the Levellers leaders were executed or imprisoned by Cromwell’s Republican government.
THE TOLPUDDLE MARTYRS
During the course of the late 18th, early 19th centuries, the industrialisation of England transformed the lives of everyone and led to a series of risings by communities trying to defend their livelihoods, such as the machine-breakers led by the mysterious Captain Ludd, and the agrarian rebels led by ‘Captain Swing’. When the agricultural labourers of the Dorset village of Tolpuddle decided to organise a local ‘friendly society’ to help each other through a period of wage cuts, Trade Unions, or Combinations as they were then called, had only just been legalised. Many early attempts to establish local unions had been smashed by the local JP and thousands of men and women (and children) were transported to penile servitude in Australia as punishment for participation in discussions about freedom of speech, or organising rent strikes or of a local union, or combination. So, when the Tolpuddle gentry and their JP arrested the six men from the village they had not yet worked out what law they had broken. The six men were eventually sentenced under the Naval Mutiny Act (the work of one William Wilberforce) for the crime of ‘organising the swearing of an oath’. But their case became a cause celebre for Liberals and radicals in England and for the early labour movement. Upon his return to England, the leader of the Tolpuddle men called upon all men to rise in support of the rights of Englishmen, and for ‘the liberation of England’s white slaves’. A direct reference to the fact that those who campaigned for an end to African slavery, neglected the cause of their own, indigenous slaves (that would affect their profits you see).
THE CHARTISTS
In the early 19th century, the rising middle class of England resented the fact that, whilst they now provided the investment in the new industries and were building and managing the new towns and cities, the power of national government was still in the hands of the old aristocracy and gentry. A major campaign was then organised for electoral reform and this involved mass demonstrations of ordinary people who believed that they would benefit from these reforms. Such a demonstration, in St Peter’s Field in Manchester in 1819, was attacked by the drunken members of the local yeomanry, and saw the slaughter of many innocent men, women and children. Eventually, as a result of these campaigns, the 1832 Reform Act was passed, this gave the vote to many of the middle class, but still excluded the majority of the population. Angered by this ‘betrayal’, a new movement was created which demanded a new Charter for England, and a series of petitions were organised, supported by demonstrations and marches that were often put down ruthlessly, most notably by the ageing Duke of Wellington as one his last acts of being Prime Minister (then again, Wellington always thought his own men were the ‘scum of the earth’ so why would he see the masses any differently?). The Chartists, as this new movement became known, echoed many of the demands of the Levellers in calling for a wider franchise, annual Parliaments, paid MPs, and an end to municipal corruption – the so-called ‘rotten boroughs’ where councils were run by oligarchies of unelected businessmen or merchants, who then nominated their own successors upon retirement. Although their aims were never realised, and the movement was broken by frustration and rivalry, the Liberal Party and then the new Labour Party were to incorporate the Chartists’ aims and all of them would be attained by the early 20th century.
RADICAL INDIVIDUALS
There have been a number of English Radicals who have stood out through our nation’s history for their courage, forward thinking (that’s why they are called ‘radical’!), and determination. We have come across Wat Tyler, but there was also Jack Cade of Kent who led a rebellion against the feeble but, locally tyrannical, government of Henry VI in 1450; Robert Aske, the Yorkshireman leader of the Pilgrimage of Grace and who drafted their petition – the Pontefract Declaration; Sunderland-born John Lilburne, the voice and conscience of the Levellers, and the man who went to prison, under both Charles I and Cromwell, for his beliefs – demanding, till the day he died, rights for the ‘Freeborn English’; there is Thomas Paine, whose book The Rights of Man’ helped create an ideology of revolution in America and France, and who was exiled from England as a result (reading his book was a capital offence in the early 19th century England – well for the poor anyway!); next there is William Cobbett, who founded the modern version of English Radicalism and whose Political Register held all politicians to account, his book ‘Rural Rides’ records the suffering of the English agricultural labourers and the loss of a way of life; Leeds-born Richard Oastler may be unfamiliar to many of you, but he founded the movement to get child labour abolished and the working day reduced to 8-hours, and in the face of opposition from the very people who passed the Anti-Slavery Act, he was also put in prison for his beliefs; and finally there is the duo of G.K Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc, both writers, and campaigners against the Boer War, but also the founders of English Distributism. Chesterton is remembered by many for the lines that frame the background to our movement – ‘for we are the people of England that have never spoken yet’.
Chesterton and Belloc are also part of a great Radical tradition in the arts and culture, from the 17th century poet John Milton, through to the Romantic Poets of the early 19th century and the artistic leaders John Ruskin and William Morris.
And we must not forget the role of England’s women. Their active role in local rent strikes, in grain seizures, and in machine-breaking, is legend. As is their role in the vanguard of both the Levellers and the Chartists. But, more notably, they are often overlooked, in favour of the Pankhursts, when it comes to campaigning for the vote. It was not the confrontational tactics of the Pankhursts that achieved the franchise, but the steady campaigning and organising of the National Union of Womens Suffrage Societies within the trade unions and the new Labour party.
As we have seen, the revolt of 1381 was the first in a series of radical ‘events’ which have helped shape English history but, strangely, these events, and the people who organised them, are also claimed by the Far Left communists, socialists, even the modern ‘Labour’ Party. In fact, they – the Left – derive their traditions, not from Wat Tyler or George Loveless, but from Vladimir Ulyanov Lenin, that intellectual landowner who abused the support of the masses to obtain power for the few, and then continued to oppress the many in a way far worse than any Czar. That is socialism, a major part of globalism – the very creed which destroys our jobs, culture and freedom. No, from all the evidence we have, these fighters for ENGLISH freedom, rights and justice that we have listed above, were not ‘internationalists’ but virtually all took as their point of origin the Anglo-Saxon culture and traditions of freedom and liberty for all, taken from the time when England was an independent Nation State and master of its own destiny.
To be an English Radical is, therefore, also to be an English Patriot: a campaigner for the return of liberty, justice and tradition for everyone living in modern England.
The word ‘radical’ is derived from the Latin radix – root. Thus to be radical can mean, in one sense, to return to tradition, to origins. But also, to be radical, is to call for ‘the transformation of the existing status quo rather than reforming it to ameliorate its worst aspects’
– in other words to demand thorough social and political change.
England is one of the oldest Nation States in Europe having been forged in the fire of invasion during the 9th and 10th centuries, and provided with a unique system of common law, which provided for trial by a jury of peers before punishment, and a local governmental system, based around the village and the county, that encouraged the participation of everybody in the management of their locality. These early traditions, of freedom and justice for all, were encouraged by the earliest English Radical, King Alfred the Great, who not only organised the fighting resistance to the Viking invader, but also translated written laws from the Latin to English, so that every citizen of the nation could read and understand the statutes that applied to them. But, after barely a century of freedom, the people of England had their entire way of life destroyed, along with their lands, possessions and, often, their lives, following the Norman invasion of 1066.
The effects of this re-distribution of wealth and power (and by physical force!), away from local English people and into the hands of an elite landowning clique are still with us in the 21st century. The descendants of the robber barons that accompanied William ‘the bastard’ still hold onto vast landholdings in 21st century England and, quite often, sit unelected in the House of Lords, or on the boards of businesses and banks, that decide the fate of ordinary folk today. However, during the passage of time there have been moments when groups of individuals dared to raise themselves against the system that enslaved them and, as English Radicals, we count them as our forebears. Here are just a few of those ‘moments’ from our past, but we will start by correcting a much-held myth:
MAGNA CARTA?
Why a question mark? Because we do not believe that Magna Carta, the so-called Great Charter, was anything other than a group of rich and greedy men, descendants of the Conqueror’s friends, who demanded a bigger slice of the national wealth and used popular freedoms as a tool to keep their peasants onside. After the carve-up at Runnymede, the majority of the poor were still enslaved in feudalism, but the monarch (then King John – the medieval equivalent of Gordon Brown!) was slightly more accountable to his barons. Associations with Runnymede thus encourage the continued destruction of English liberties whilst enshrining the rule of an out-of-touch political class. Modern politicians like to quote Magna Carta, after all, these are the people who sign EU Treaties that give away our freedoms without consulting us, says it all really.
1381 – THE GREAT REVOLT
In 1380 the government of the young King Richard II, desperate to rebuild the treasury after years of public spending on overseas wars, tripled the tax that everyone over 15 years of age would pay regardless of income. After fifty years of fighting foreign wars, and of coping with the loss of over 50% of the population through plague, this led to a series of local uprisings against the government’s tax collectors. The most serious of these uprisings saw the men of the south-east seize control of the city of London, forcing the young King and his advisors to concede to the rebels’ ‘charter’. What were their demands?
1. Wholesale emancipation from all forms of serfdom and labour service.
2. A return of full powers to local government. In effect, England would become a federation of County-Kingdoms.
3. The return of Anglo-Saxon laws protecting popular rights and freedoms.
4. Abolition of lordship and the division of property between all men.
After the King agreed to the terms, the rebels dispersed to their shires where their leaders were later hunted down, and then hung, drawn and quartered. The rebels’ main leader, Wat Tyler, was murdered and the King renounced the agreement he had made earlier. Observing one of the executions Richard said: ‘you will remain in bondage, not as before but incomparably harsher’.
PILGRIMAGE OF GRACE
In the 16th century Henry VIII established the Church of England, with himself at the head, and during the course of the period 1535-37 destroyed a culture and religious tradition that had existed for over 800 years. Without a second’s thought for the consequences, Henry and his advisors ordered the wholesale upheaval of popular worship, and destroyed the institutions that had provided employment, sustenance and spiritual enlightenment to the people of England. In 1536, the North of England rose in revolt against these changes demanding that Henry return England to its traditional religion, in what became known as the Pilgrimage of Grace. They also demanded a return to more localised systems of justice and self-government – this was the Pontefract Declaration. Faced with an organised rebel army, Henry agreed to all of the demands and asked the rebels to disperse to their communities. Once they were back home, and isolated from the main force, their leaders were hunted down and executed (familiar theme?). The only concession that Henry made was the creation of the first regional government in England – the Council of the North, based in York - and that was run by, and for, the nobles and gentry.
THE PUTNEY DEBATES
In the 17th century, the new ranks of gentry that had been enriched as a result of the acquisition of the former religious lands, decided that they wanted to have more of a say in running the country and in deciding when and why they would pay tax. This led to the English Civil War and, in order to raise their local forces, the leaders of the Parliamentarians claimed to be fighting on behalf of greater liberty for all. In fact, once victory was in the bag, Parliament, like Richard II and Henry VIII before them, wanted the masses to forget what they had been promised and go back home to their previous pauper-like existence, and leave the freedoms and liberties to those who had the money and land to make use of them.
This now led to a series of political outpourings by representatives of the New Model Army and their citizen supporters, in particular, by a group of men and women known as the Levellers. The Levellers demanded universal suffrage; annual Parliaments; paid MPs, so that the poor could be represented; freedom of speech and of the press; religious toleration; and reform of local government making all office-holders accountable. The Levellers, and their spokesmen, believed that every Englishman was born free, and that he should have more of a say in how he was governed. More, they believed that Parliament was there to represent the people and that if it failed to do so could be removed by force, the same as had happened with the King. In the local parish church at Putney, the Levellers argued their case with the representative of Parliament, Henry Ireton, who had been sent to argue the case that only men of property should be elected to Parliament. This led to the quote by the Leveller leader Thomas Rainborowe – ‘the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he’. Eventually the Levellers leaders were executed or imprisoned by Cromwell’s Republican government.
THE TOLPUDDLE MARTYRS
During the course of the late 18th, early 19th centuries, the industrialisation of England transformed the lives of everyone and led to a series of risings by communities trying to defend their livelihoods, such as the machine-breakers led by the mysterious Captain Ludd, and the agrarian rebels led by ‘Captain Swing’. When the agricultural labourers of the Dorset village of Tolpuddle decided to organise a local ‘friendly society’ to help each other through a period of wage cuts, Trade Unions, or Combinations as they were then called, had only just been legalised. Many early attempts to establish local unions had been smashed by the local JP and thousands of men and women (and children) were transported to penile servitude in Australia as punishment for participation in discussions about freedom of speech, or organising rent strikes or of a local union, or combination. So, when the Tolpuddle gentry and their JP arrested the six men from the village they had not yet worked out what law they had broken. The six men were eventually sentenced under the Naval Mutiny Act (the work of one William Wilberforce) for the crime of ‘organising the swearing of an oath’. But their case became a cause celebre for Liberals and radicals in England and for the early labour movement. Upon his return to England, the leader of the Tolpuddle men called upon all men to rise in support of the rights of Englishmen, and for ‘the liberation of England’s white slaves’. A direct reference to the fact that those who campaigned for an end to African slavery, neglected the cause of their own, indigenous slaves (that would affect their profits you see).
THE CHARTISTS
In the early 19th century, the rising middle class of England resented the fact that, whilst they now provided the investment in the new industries and were building and managing the new towns and cities, the power of national government was still in the hands of the old aristocracy and gentry. A major campaign was then organised for electoral reform and this involved mass demonstrations of ordinary people who believed that they would benefit from these reforms. Such a demonstration, in St Peter’s Field in Manchester in 1819, was attacked by the drunken members of the local yeomanry, and saw the slaughter of many innocent men, women and children. Eventually, as a result of these campaigns, the 1832 Reform Act was passed, this gave the vote to many of the middle class, but still excluded the majority of the population. Angered by this ‘betrayal’, a new movement was created which demanded a new Charter for England, and a series of petitions were organised, supported by demonstrations and marches that were often put down ruthlessly, most notably by the ageing Duke of Wellington as one his last acts of being Prime Minister (then again, Wellington always thought his own men were the ‘scum of the earth’ so why would he see the masses any differently?). The Chartists, as this new movement became known, echoed many of the demands of the Levellers in calling for a wider franchise, annual Parliaments, paid MPs, and an end to municipal corruption – the so-called ‘rotten boroughs’ where councils were run by oligarchies of unelected businessmen or merchants, who then nominated their own successors upon retirement. Although their aims were never realised, and the movement was broken by frustration and rivalry, the Liberal Party and then the new Labour Party were to incorporate the Chartists’ aims and all of them would be attained by the early 20th century.
RADICAL INDIVIDUALS
There have been a number of English Radicals who have stood out through our nation’s history for their courage, forward thinking (that’s why they are called ‘radical’!), and determination. We have come across Wat Tyler, but there was also Jack Cade of Kent who led a rebellion against the feeble but, locally tyrannical, government of Henry VI in 1450; Robert Aske, the Yorkshireman leader of the Pilgrimage of Grace and who drafted their petition – the Pontefract Declaration; Sunderland-born John Lilburne, the voice and conscience of the Levellers, and the man who went to prison, under both Charles I and Cromwell, for his beliefs – demanding, till the day he died, rights for the ‘Freeborn English’; there is Thomas Paine, whose book The Rights of Man’ helped create an ideology of revolution in America and France, and who was exiled from England as a result (reading his book was a capital offence in the early 19th century England – well for the poor anyway!); next there is William Cobbett, who founded the modern version of English Radicalism and whose Political Register held all politicians to account, his book ‘Rural Rides’ records the suffering of the English agricultural labourers and the loss of a way of life; Leeds-born Richard Oastler may be unfamiliar to many of you, but he founded the movement to get child labour abolished and the working day reduced to 8-hours, and in the face of opposition from the very people who passed the Anti-Slavery Act, he was also put in prison for his beliefs; and finally there is the duo of G.K Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc, both writers, and campaigners against the Boer War, but also the founders of English Distributism. Chesterton is remembered by many for the lines that frame the background to our movement – ‘for we are the people of England that have never spoken yet’.
Chesterton and Belloc are also part of a great Radical tradition in the arts and culture, from the 17th century poet John Milton, through to the Romantic Poets of the early 19th century and the artistic leaders John Ruskin and William Morris.
And we must not forget the role of England’s women. Their active role in local rent strikes, in grain seizures, and in machine-breaking, is legend. As is their role in the vanguard of both the Levellers and the Chartists. But, more notably, they are often overlooked, in favour of the Pankhursts, when it comes to campaigning for the vote. It was not the confrontational tactics of the Pankhursts that achieved the franchise, but the steady campaigning and organising of the National Union of Womens Suffrage Societies within the trade unions and the new Labour party.
As we have seen, the revolt of 1381 was the first in a series of radical ‘events’ which have helped shape English history but, strangely, these events, and the people who organised them, are also claimed by the Far Left communists, socialists, even the modern ‘Labour’ Party. In fact, they – the Left – derive their traditions, not from Wat Tyler or George Loveless, but from Vladimir Ulyanov Lenin, that intellectual landowner who abused the support of the masses to obtain power for the few, and then continued to oppress the many in a way far worse than any Czar. That is socialism, a major part of globalism – the very creed which destroys our jobs, culture and freedom. No, from all the evidence we have, these fighters for ENGLISH freedom, rights and justice that we have listed above, were not ‘internationalists’ but virtually all took as their point of origin the Anglo-Saxon culture and traditions of freedom and liberty for all, taken from the time when England was an independent Nation State and master of its own destiny.
To be an English Radical is, therefore, also to be an English Patriot: a campaigner for the return of liberty, justice and tradition for everyone living in modern England.